Monday, September 17, 2018

Review of the AnyTone AT-868UV

The AnyTone AT-868UV (868 from now on) is a very
cool "Digital Mobile Radio" (AKA DMR
radio).It's a dual-band analog radio
that also supports DMR so you can use it for both classic analog and digital. I
really like the "Zone" feature, which is nothing more than a grouping
of channels.Zones are great for me
since I only want to see some channels when when I'm at my summer home or
working with my ARES team.This is
similar to the Yaesu "Bank" but Yaesu banks are hard to use, not
labeled on some radios and kind of kludgy.The way you switch banks is different on my two Yaesu HTs and I’m always
forgetting how it works.

I won the 868 in a raffle at a Papa System Group
love-in.The Papa Group is a great bunch
of hams here is SoCal, supporting about 14 analog repeaters in Southern
California that can use IRLP linking.In
addition they have 11 D-STAR repeaters, and 13 DMR repeaters with more
coming.By the way, the reason the Papa
System is so popular is that all of the analog repeaters are linked together
with bridges to D-STAR and DMR.

A bonus for me is that the Papa dudes also
supplied a configuration file that I could put on my radio that had all of the
analog and DMR repeaters programmed into it (called a code plug).This allowed me to totally grok DMR setup of
frequencies, callgroups, zones, and scan groups in minutes. Their code plug is
available on their website (papasys.com).

A quick word on DMR

Before I go on any further, I need to explain,
as briefly as I can, what DMR (Digital Mobile Radio) is and how its different.DMR is digital which does a few things right
offthe bat.

It allows repeaters to handle more than
just one conversation at a time.In
this case, DMR repeaters use TDMA (time division multiple access) allowing
two conversations at a time by switching back and forth between two “time
slots”.This is done so quickly you
don’t notice (like on the old TDMA cell phones)..

Because
your voice is digitized when it comes out of the radio, it makes it easy
to integrate other digital technologies and add additional features.For example, all of the BrandMeister
repeaters worldwide arelinked
together on the internet,

Each
transmission has some header info about who you are, the on-ramp that you
took and what “talkgroup” you want to communicate with..

Connections
are without noise since it’s voice over digital, the voice is there or it
isn’t.There’s bound to be some
data loss so the protocol includes some amount of forward error correction
that’s being done..NOTE: I've added some additional important info on this point on my DMR tips page.

Because it's digital, you can easily build or buy a little box that we refer to as a "hotspot", basically, you own personal repeater. This allows you dedicate frequencies that you want to listen to all the time to your own repeater and experiment without taking up one of the slots on a public repeater.

Talkgroups:
If you think of
a single stand-alone repeater as a group of people that want to talk to each
other, that’s a “talkgroup”.All of the
Papa System analog repeaters mentioned above are linked together forming a very
large coverage area creating a larger "talkgroup".If an operator is out of
town, there are ways to connect with a cell phone as well.Keep all of this in mind.DMR has over 1,270 talkgroups with room for
more.They do this by connecting each
repeater (or the little hotspots like the one in my home) to a network of
computers.When a repeater or hotspot
(I’ll just say repeater from no on) is subscribed to a talk group, any
transmission that is destined for that group is heard by all the operators
listening via a repeater.Just think of it as a massive
website of pages where a page is a talkgroup and instead of a web page, it’s
voice.Lastly, if an operator is using a
repeater and wants to talk to his pals on the SoCal 31066 talk group but the
repeater isn’t currently subscribed to it full-time, all he/she has to do is dial
in the repeater and tell his radio what talk group he wants to communicate with
and transmit.The radio sends the
destination talkgroup with each transmission and the repeater will dynamically
add the group to the subscribed list on the repeater if it’s isn’t already.Now the operator just joined the group and
can hear everyone else no matter what their on-ramp is.Think of it as being able to connect to any
repeater in the world from any repeater with just the push of a button. There are over 1300 Brandmiester talk groups.

For me, DMR using the Brandmeister network
really opens up a new world of capabilities.Users of Analog repeaters can link the repeater to another
repeater,if it is supported,using special tones sent from their
radio.I’ve see local hams do this by
linking the repeater I’m on to one in New York or elsewhere.DMR changes this because it makes connecting
to a "talkgroup" from anywhere in the world as easy as pressing the transmit
button on your HT.If I was in Russia, I
could use a local repeater or hotspot and yak with my pals that monitor the
SoCal group here in San Diego in seconds.If you are into radio, this is pretty cool.

There’s one catch though.If at any time the repeater becomes
disconnected from the internet, it acts like any old-school repeater by only
having the capability to communicate with users on that specific repeater.In a disaster, not a problem, just choose the
“local” talk group and the repeater knows not to even try to use the Internet.

AnyTone AT-868UV FEATURES

●Low Cost - $179 at Amazon
(mine was a $20 raffle ticket)

●Size: 5" tall, 2
14" wide, 1" deep w/o clip, antenna 6" tall

●Better Battery. 3100 mAH
Lithium Ion

●Frequency Range: 136~174
& 400~480MHz

●True 2 slot which complies
to Motorola Tier I and II

●Auto-senses digital or
analog reception

●6 W, 5 W, 2.5W or 0.5W - 7
W max on VHF

●0.25 V Analog @ 25 kHz,
=0.35 V Analog @ 12.5 kHz

●0.3 V/-117.4 dBm (BER 5%)
DMR.

●4,000 Channels, 10,000 Talk
Groups with 150,000 Contacts

●can be set to single or
dual channel operation

●12.5 kHz/25 kHz Analog, and
12.5 kHz DMR

●Easy import of DMR contact
database (entire world wide)

●IP-54 Water and Dust Resistant

●Free
Programming Software

A rundown of what I like and
don’t like

My Top 10 LIKES :)

Build
Quality - This is a much better radio than I was
anticipating.The market has a few very
cheap Chinese radios like the BaoFeng UV-5R, a very popular cheap and
disposable radio but well liked.If the
BaoFeng blows a final, you just spring for a new one.The Anytone radio is rugged.Although I’ve only dropped it once so
far.I watched a YouTuber mention that
he was also impressed that the radio has held up to multiple drops over the
last few months.This is important to me
asI do Summits on The Air (SOTA) where
I climb to mountain tops and use my VHF and HF radios to make contacts.I need something that is reliable in these
conditions.

Configurability
on the radio - One other interesting thing about this
radio compared to some of the other DMR radios is that this unit is fully
configurable without a computer.There
are many radios out there that are only configurable by hooking them to your
computer and downloading a new configuration.DMR started it's life in commercialand public safety applications where you typically don't want users to
change anything other than a few channels, so this makes sense.Also, all of the buttons on the radio are
programmable and very useful.For
example, being able to turn digital monitor on and off while using the radio is
very handy.

Easy to
program - The user interface for programming on the
radio is pretty straightforward.In
addition, the PC programming software seems well thought out (remember, I’m a
geek so this kinda stuff comes easy for me).

Free
programming software - The software that comes with
some of the expensive Yaesu radios is crippled forcing you to purchase
software.Some radios don’t even come
with a programming cable.This radio
comes with both included!

An
active development team - What I mean here is that
there are firmware updates coming out pretty often that enable new features and
resolve bugs.The hardware has been on
the market for a while and early users complained of quite a few bugs.For me I’ve only run into a couple.Because it’s a software defined radio with
GPS and quite a bit of memory, there continues to be a lot of future potential
for my radio as each release of the firmware enables new features.

DMR
feature flexibility - If I want to use a talkgroup on
a repeater that I’m on but the radio isn’t setup with that pair (repeater
config + talkgroup number), I can override a current channel config in seconds,
using an existing channel to the repeater and override the talkgroup
number.This is super handy since I
don’t want to program in every talkgroup I might ever want to use on every
single repeater that I might connect to.

Internet
support - Because this radio hit the high notes with
amateur radio dudes, it’s selling like crazy.Since geeks are the ones that are into ham radio, and geeks publish
blogs and videos, there is tons of support available.

Battery
Life - The radio can go a couple of days at
times.Part of this due to the nature of
digital and TDMA.When
transmitting,the unit is actually in
transmit mode less than 50% of the time (for every second you transmit, it’s
actually only transmitting .4 seconds).

Availability
of accessories - The jacks on this unit are similar to
others on the market so things like head mounted mic/earphones work.

Documentation
- Use of the radio seems pretty well documented and
readable.Less expensive radios have
been known to have some pretty bad manuals, but not this one.

Dislikes :(

No Air-Band - The lowest this radio goes is 136.0 mHz.Sound
Quality - One thing I don't like is the sound
quality.DMR is a bit compressed but not
bad.Unfortunately the speaker can make
it sound really bad at times, kind of tinging sound...While using a cheap headset for a
conversation, it sounded great. Supposidly this unit has "IP-54 Water and Dust Resistant" which most likely contributes to the funky sound. I think
it may also be due to the size of the speaker and the fact that all the sounds has
to come through two little holes in the front.

Documentation
- There’s no help files for the PC programming
software and some of the options that you can set on the radio can be very
confusing.There are well written docs
on installing the software and how to upgrade the firmware online.

Lock
isn’t really lock - There is a keypad lock but the
keypad is the only thing that is locked. I want everything but the volume
control locked.When using it I don’t
want to accidently hit one of the many buttons and change this thing.Also, when hiking, my radio gets jostled
around quite a bit and I don’t want to pick it up, start using it, only to find
I’m on a different frequency or some other features is turned on that is
keeping me from communicating.My other
radios have this so why not this unit.Another reason to be able to quickly lock the unit is if you need to
hand it to another user that is unfamiliar with the radio.If they accidently change something, they may
not be able to get it back to where it was easily.

Search in programming software is needed - One of the things that DMR brings (because of the way that current radios work) is that operators need to configure all of the talk groups they want to use for each repeater. That means if you have 5 repeaters in your area, and you want to be able to easily jump from machine to machine with 5 talk groups, you have to setup 25 channels. Most likely, a user will also setup analog repeaters. This means you end up with a lot of "channels". The Papa code plug comes with 978 channels. Users take these channels and group them into smaller sets so that they are useful. The software support up to 4000 channels! It would be nice to have search on the main channel screen to see how you setup a channel. Also, when setting up a new group, rather than scrolling through over 1100 channels in my case, I could easily search for the channel name.This is a warning to new owners of the 868, make sure you use a good rubric for naming channels. Some screens allow you to order channels by name to reduce the issue of lack of search capability.

SUMMARY

In summary, I'm really impressed with the
AT-868UV radio.Yes, it’s the only DMR
radio that I’ve had but even as a analog radio I actually like it better.I’ll let you look at the other reviews on the
internet but I’ve never seen it loose a head to head with another DMR
radio.The AT-878 was recently
announced and that might be the best yet.If they support APRS in analog mode, that will enable it to make the cut
for my primary HT in my SOTA loadout.As a bonus, it’s also supposed to have "roaming".

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Chris Claborne is incredibly curious about technology, people and the world and is always trying to understand how things work. He's a "Technology Geek". The internet is fascinating place to learn, interact and watch from a technology perspective. He has 23+ years in IT for Fortune 500 companies and a specific interests in Cloud Computing.
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